Tag: Dissociation

When someone who’s hurt us behaves as though nothing is wrong, they deny what we feel. When confronted and reacting as though we’ve hurt them, they deny us once again and put a fiction in our place.

And in their place, we move through the subsequent Kubler-Ross stages of grief for them as externalized ego-functions of them. We’re infuriated, confused. We try desperately to reason with them, to save both ourselves and the relationship. And when it becomes dreadfully apparent that it is we, not they, who must choose one or the other then we feel sadness. It is at this critical juncture, this decision at this point that separates the narcissist and their enablers from we who survive and succeed them.

Mother’s eyes grow round with horror as she looks upon me transformed into a monster. I must be terrifying but I feel nothing. Nothing but an endless serenity disconnected from the chaos playing out before me on the big screen in a darkened theater. The movie being shown feels unreal, strange like a dream. Only, it’s not really a movie.

Sobbing uncontrollably like a weepy, open wound that just won’t heal, I’m sitting, wilted in defeat, across from a counselor at Tacoma Community College who is patiently, very patiently, listening to me blubber out word sounds. He’s a professor and, as it happens, a psychologist. After a few minutes, he leans forward and says to me, “I think you should cut contact with your brother until you feel that you’re ready to contact him again.”